“There are 805 million undernourished people in the world today. That means one in nine people do not get enough food to be healthy and lead an active life. Hunger and malnutrition are in fact the number one risk to health worldwide — greater than AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis combined.”

— World Food Programme

“Between 2005 and 2050, food prices for maize, rice, and wheat are projected to increase by 104, 79, and 88 percent, respectively, while those for beef, pork, and poultry will rise by 32, 70, and 77 percent, respectively. Moreover, the number of people at risk of hunger in the developing world will grow from 881 million in 2005 to more than a billion people by 2050.”

— International Food Policy Research Institute

“The soil is the great connector of lives, the source and destination of all. It is the healer and restorer and resurrector, by which disease passes into health, age into youth, death into life. Without proper care for it we can have no community, because without proper care for it we can have no life.”

— Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture

Agricultural Development

Technology for Agriculture

“We will need to produce as much food in the next 40 years as we have in the last 8,000.”

— Dr. Jason Clay, Senior VP, World Wildlife Fund

Reforms to agricultural and land management practices are needed to combat a future of soil exhaustion and food insecurity forecasted by scientific organizations worldwide, as the world’s populations continue to rise and issues of food security and nutrition are exacerbated.

Motivated by this call, we have been developing technologies to support agroecological analyses on a variety of different spatio-temporal scales.

Working as a technology partner for projects and organizations such as the Africa Soil Information Service (AfSIS), CIMMYT, Feed The Future, and One Acre Fund, QED has focused on developing end-to-end data processing workflows to support the full lifecycle of data. This workflow includes field data acquisition, barcoding, database management, and map visualization. These technologies have been introduced in several African countries in collaboration with their governments, with the aim of closing information gaps and positively influencing public policy and industrial practices, if executed in coordination with partners. Below we describe some of these technologies in further detail.

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Predictive Maps of Croplands, Human Settlements, and Soil Chemistry

We have been developing technologies to allow scientists to more efficiently and reliably catalogue soil and landscape resources by leveraging some of today’s most influential technologies, including web and mobile, crowdsourcing, machine learning, cloud, and UAVs.

As an example, we can generate digital maps such as the one on the left by collecting crowdsourced assessments of recent satellite imagery backed by expert verification, and then building ML models to extrapolate predictions throughout the region. These predictions can also supplemented with uncertainty measures.

Readers are encouraged to browse more examples of applications below.

End-to-End Data Processing Workflow

QED aims to build suites of interlocking software providing for end-to-end support. The components should be freely interchangeable, as our design is inspired by several key tenets of ESR’s rules of UNIX, reproduced below:

Rule of Modularity: Write simple parts connected by clean interfaces.

Rule of Composition: Design programs to be connected with other programs.

Rule of Simplicity: Design for simplicity; add complexity only where you must.

Rule of Transparency: Design for visibility to make inspection and debugging easier.

Geosurvey

Overview:

KoBoToolbox

Easily deploy large-scale field surveys with Excel and Android phones, with automated support for a wide range of essential data including georeferences, timestamps, pictures, barcode scanning, caching until wifi returns, and scalable geospatial visualizations and fraud detection.

Data Computation and Visualization

Generate maps of agroecological properties by leveraging crowdsourced data and scalable ML computation in the cloud.

Predict soil chemistry concentrations of critical nutrients and trace elements in the soil from cost-efficient spectroscopy measurements, using the best calibrated models to date and backed by uncertainty measurements.

Geosurvey

Overview:

KoBoToolbox

Easily deploy large-scale field surveys with Excel and Android phones, with automated support for a wide range of essential data including georeferences, timestamps, pictures, barcode scanning, caching until wifi returns, and scalable geospatial visualizations and fraud detection.

Data Computation and Visualization

Generate maps of agroecological properties by leveraging crowdsourced data and scalable ML computation in the cloud.

Predict soil chemistry concentrations of critical nutrients and trace elements in the soil from cost-efficient spectroscopy measurements, using the best calibrated models to date and backed by uncertainty measurements.